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African Academies of Science promote access to digital knowledge resources

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I have not blogged for a while – I have been drowning, not waving, as I prepared the final report for my OSI International Policy Fellowship and put in place proposals for the projects that will carry forward the work started in the Fellowship programme (more on both of these in the next week or so).

Looking back over these last months, I realise that there have been some promising indications that things are moving on the African continent as university leaders tackle the challenge of the knowledge divide. A recent event that I attended was was convened as an International Planning Meeting of the Inter-Academy Panel on International Issues (IAP). Organised by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and the US National Academy of Science (NAS), it brought together delegates from the African Academies of Science in Pretoria in May for an intensive one-day workshop on ‘Promoting Access to and use of Digital Knowledge Resources in Countries with Developing and Transitional Economies: The Role of Science Academies in Africa’.

Speaking for the host academy, Professor Wieland Gevers, Chair of the Publishing Committee of ASSAf, outlined the new role that is emerging for African Academies. This is the provision of evidence-based policy advice on research and the higher education sector. The focus is to build strong academies that would be effective partners for government, providing expert advice
to governments from an independent perspective.. Many African academies focused on publishing, Gevers said. ASSAf recognized the overwhelming importance in developing countries of growing indigenous publishing. In its 5 years of existence ASSAf has conducted a major research project on scholarly publication in South Africa on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology, culminating in a set of strong recommendations for the development of open access journals and repositories. Government was indicating its willingness, he said (very soon) to ask the academy to oversee the implementation of a national system of inter-operable repositories as well as a system of journals and other scholarly publishing paid for by government – on the basis of Chile. The ASSAf proposal is that a proportion of the subsidy paid to
universities for authorship journal articles and other scholarly publications be top-sliced to support the publication of national journals. The Academy is raising funding to set up an editors’ forum that would help to enhance the quality of locally-produced journals and would promote the idea of open access publishing through the green and gold routes as a way of growing and strengthening high quality research output from South Africa.

Paul Uhlir, speaking for the IAP, said that the objective was to strengthen the capacity of the African academies through an initiative to enhance access to information. using digital knowledge resources. An aim is the creation of OA institutional repositories in the developing world. Proposals were being finalized for new programmes to provide higher visibility for developing country research. .This is particularly important in sub-Saharan Africa, given the concern expressed by Sospeter
Mohangu of the ICSU regional office for Africa. at the declining ratio of sub-Saharan African scholarly output on the global stage – Africa is losing ground, he said, in comparison with Latin America, North Africa, and Asia.

Delegates from across the continent provided the usual litany of connectivity problems, but, on a more optismistic note, talked of advances made in ICT policy development. These included the creation of Ministerial posts for ICT, policies providing incentives for manufacture of hardware and software, and the development of networks for sharing research, for the promotion of electronic publishing, and the preservation of electronic materials. Paul Uhlir commented , however, that the creation of ICT ministries without attention being paid to the the problems of information provision is problematic. African governments need information policies to grow African research content alongside ICT policies for the growth of the technical infrastructure. Mechanisms are needed to promote development and access in the first instance to information produced at national and regional levels and secondarily to information produced in the OECD countries.

Professor El Hadj Ibrahima Diop of the Senegalese Academy said that in Senegal, the academy (a young academy) has a commitment to the communication
of scientific research both to scientists and the general public, as well as its government advisory role. In Senegal, he said, the infrastructure is moving, the political will is there, and the academy trying to play its role. However, while, as an academy, the goal is the promotion of scientific work, it is currently limited when it comes to the promotion of publishing activities. The Senegalese academy is not yet committed to publication of scientific research; the question of access to scholarly content has been addressed, but not the .growth of national research content. This was a matter of shifting to participation in scholarly publication by African scholars.

Along with other delegates, Diop expressed concern that an over-emphasis on traditional global scholarly publishing routes was alienating young academics, given the imbalances in the journal publishing indexes, which are dominated by older researchers and favour publication from countries in the North. Diop challenged the hegemony of the academic journal, with its word counts and inequitable value systems and very slow timescales – if scholarly publishing is a matter of communication, rather than the route for personal promotion, he asked, what would the most appropriate model be for what we need to communicate in Africa? If the journal is an old-fashioned genre, he said, do Africans have the courage to say this is not the route for us?

Malik Maaza of iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator-based Science in Cape Town (a project of the National Research Foundation) concurred, saying that enhancing the visibility of high quality African journals, like the South African Journal of Science, should ensure free access to peer reviewed scholarship in Africa in a short
period. Right now, he felt that the system was not presenting the right platform for young scholars and was contributing to the brain drain. What was required was continued lobbying within the political arena to keep up the momentum.

In this context, while there was consensus that peer review was an essential component of quality assurance, there was also acknowledgment of the problems of traditional peer review systems. Both Ibrahima Diop and Paul Uhlir spoke of the need to investigate new methods on online pre- and post-publication collaborative peer review alongside the traditional systems.

In discussion, there was consensus that, in the African context, what was needed was the creation of a stable of high-quality open access journals and other publications with a regional and national focus, to raise the profile of African scholarship. In South Africa, government funding should be available to support such an initiative and this was likely to be needed in other countries. Subscriptions for paper versions of journals could also be a way of providing some sustainability. Regional journals could help provide sustainability where there was a lack of critical mass at local level.

The workshop ended with proposals for a vigorous programme for the promotion of ICT connectivity in Africa and for a forward-looking, active and open approach to the development of African research publication.

Global ecosystems – piracy and inequality

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Another plenary session that I covered in the iCommons blog at the Dubrovnik iCommons Summit was a session on Global Ecosystems, in which the presentations by Bodo Balacz (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) and Lawrence
Liang (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) stood out both for their provocative content – the subject was ‘piracy’ – and for the virtuosity of their arguments.What is particularly challenging in their arguments is the presentation of a world view that is not grounded in the presuppositions that underlie an often aggressive Western view of the rights and wrongs of copyright. This was my reflection on what they said, from an African perspective:

A panel that contains both Bodo Balazs and Lawrence Liang was bound to be lively. They did not disappoint in the closing plenary of the iCommons. Both had a similar message – that the ‘pirates’ are harbingers of future trends in the face of market inefficiencies and failures. Balazs made a compelling case in a historical survey of repeated resistance to monopolistic tendencies in in the development trajectory of the copyright regime The pattern that appears in his analysis is one of nodes of resistance at stages at which there were fundamental shifts in the economic, social and technological framework of how culture is produced. What emerged strongly from Bodo’s history of ‘pirate’ resistance was the ethical base of these acts of resistance, which explicitly aimed to remedy injustices and imbalances, rather than targeting financial gain.

Read more on the iCommons blog site

Yochai Benkler speaks at the iCommons

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Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks has made a remarkable impact in the short time since it was published. Larry Lessig hailed it as probably the most important book of the decade. Benkler’s keynote at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik was therefore awaited with considerable anticipation by many of us who know his work.

I covered his keynote address at the iCommons Summit: In a densely argued paper, Benkler persuaded Commoners that where we are – the Commons movement – is not a passing fashion but a basic reality and part of a transitional trend in social, economic and political affairs. In the traditional media, where massive investment is required to obtain a voice, power is centralised in the hands of the large corporations, making it all to easy for the voices of ordinary citizens to be silenced.

But mass dissemination of information is now possible through decentralised peer-to-peer and collaborative networks, creating space for effective resistance by ordinary citizens against attempts to force silence through censorship or to bury corruption.

The importance of Benkler’s argument is that he takes the debate about collaborative modes of knowledge production deeper than the cultural context in which these issues are usually set, arguing that the Commons poses a fundamental challenge to the accepted proprietary theories of how economics and politics work. The growth of non-proprietary, collaborative ways of working offers opportunities for addressing human welfare and development, away from the power dynamics of big business and political hegemonies.

Read on in the iCommons blog, where I report that what emerged in Benkler’s talk was, first of all, an analysis of the ethical dimesnions of the Commons and, secondly, a dense bu fascinating account of how peer production and his picture of a world in which the tensions between the proprietary and non-proprietary modes of production could lead to the development of a
new version of the political economy.

iCommons grows up – what measures for success?

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I blogged a few articles on the iCommons blog in Dubrovnik over the last few days. Here is a link to a reflection on how one judges the success of free culture projects in a rapidly-maturing community.

What to expect from the opening plenary of a conference that is essentially about copyright? Only a few years ago it would have been a stuffy hall at the London Book Fair, in the dingy surrounds of Olympia on a rainy Saturday in April. The experts in their suits would drone on, assuming the reassuring earnestness of a doctor’s bedside manner to tell us how successful they had been in prosecuting the pirates in India and how China was beginning to be copyright observant. The most dramatic we could hope for was an alarmist display of web pages showing the speed and effectiveness of the burgeoning informal online pirate economy.

Not so here at the second iCommons Summit. First of all, iCommons goes for stunning settings – last year on Copacabana Beach in Rio, this weekend in the Revelin Fort on the edge of Dubrovnik old town. This means that we come into the conference hall with the smell of pine resin in our nostrils, slightly dazzled by the brilliance of the white boats in the harbour and early morning sun reflecting off the blond stone of the old city. What we were treated to when we got inside was a bravura display from a movement that in one brief year is displaying a new confidence in the success of its alternative creative vision.

The beautiful settings hide something else that emerged very strongly in the opening plenary session and that is that iCommons is a truly global, polyglot community. It is no accident that the conferences happen in places that are off the major beat of the USA and Europe – or even the Asian industrialised powerhouses. it means that iCommons can specialize in the off-beat. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this offbeat quality means that it is lightweight. it is all a matter of how one measures success.

A free education world explored in a fortress by the sea

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iCommons has a talent for holding its conferences in beautiful places. Last year it was Copacabana Beach in Rio. This year we met in Dubrovnik, in the Revelin fortress on the edge of the centuries-old city walls. Very different to Rio, but some similarities – an intensely blue Adriatic sea, muggy heat, a laid-back atmosphere. But there the similarities ended. Dubrovnik is very much a European city, perhaps even surprisingly so, given its location on the far edge of a Mediterranean culture. In some ways it feels more Germanic than Southern, with its pristine city walls in blond stone, impeccably restored after the war with Serbia and Montenegro, and its gleaming polished marble streets in the old town. But then there are the villas climbing steep hills behind the old town, the patches of brilliant colour from flowering trees, the grape vine pergolas over sea-facing terraces, the scent of pine resin over cafe tables and the olive green foliage of the islands – all this is decidedly southern.

The conference rooms in the Revelin fortress were all in blond stone, with vaulted stone ceilings, soft light and shadows. Ironical perhaps that this was the setting for an often passionate discussion about the nature of free culture, often anarchic, never boring. It is hard to capture the spirit of what was this year a diverse event, from deep intellectual discussion to presentations by free culture radicals, to the workshop sessions of the Open Education stream. This challenged the formal conference structure of the rest of the Summit, with its more rigid panel discussions, where expert opinions provided a framework of authority and response. Instead, the nature of Open Education was explored in what some speculated might be a subversive symbolic setting, the Lazar-house set on the rocks over Dubrovnik’s most fashionable beach.

The discussions led with gusto by Allen Gunn revealed a wide diversity of views from a global patchwork of people. What emerged was the capacity to reconcile the sometimes extreme dogmatic views about what constitutes Open Education, whether the dogmatism be free content, open source software, collaborative communities, or whatever. The workshop context allowed discussion of these diverging views and, above all, the emergence of a much more complex and pedagogically-informed
tapestry of the potential that could be offered by Open Education in a variety of geographical and educational contexts. It is much more than just content, the participants agreed. Also, they concurred, there has been too little attention paid
to informal education and lifelong learning, the possibilities offered for mature learners.

The process was sometimes anarchic – go to Steve Foersters blog on the speed-geeking session on the iCommons website, or look at the podcast of the workshop participants acting out open education as a flight of geese. As is familiar to many educationists, a collaborative workshopping process like this one can be playful, but the results are often more serious and complex that earnest discussion can be. Perhaps this is a model for future Commons conferencing (along the lines that I believe Sakai has taken). This has opened up a blog discussion on the iCommons site – it will be interesting to see where this leads.

The workshop participants commented rather acerbically that the panel discussion on Open Education held in the main stream of the conference did not contain one teacher. But was acknowledged was that this was the one stream that produced a
series of concrete recommendations and projects for tracking in iCommons 2008 in Tokio.

There is a plethora of blog articles on the new iCommons site – see the education track on the iCommons blog for a wide-ranging discussion of the issues.